Cover(ing) migration: the visual narrativisation of flight, asylum, and security practices

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on the entanglement of images of migration and people’s affective reactions to those depicted. Our claim is that visual images carry and reproduce specific narratives about people migrating, which in turn influences legal decision-making and political responses to migration. For doing so, we will provide a qualitative, comparative study of the metaphorical structures of selected U.S. American and German magazine covers from 2015 to 2023. The corpus of visual texts and their framing has migration and mobility practices in relation to human rights as its topic. This time frame allows us to trace the public discourse about migration through several stages which were important for the German and U.S. American cultural-legal context. We claim that Germany and the U.S. are comparable in terms of how migration is narrativised: Similar visual means have found their way into migration discourse in both countries as can be seen in recurring visual tropes.